Email / SMS reminders w/Exchange

August 6, 2007 1:13 PM

I there a way to have Exchange email or SMS meeting reminders to your cell phone?

I want to have email / sms reminders of meetings in my Exchange calender sent to my cell phone. Is there a cheap / easy way to set this up w/o getting the Exchange admin involved. If I have to get them involved, how complicated is that?

posted by cowmix to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

This had a lot of votes here. But it doesn't look like it specifically covers calendar reminders. In that case, you may want to look at syncing your desktop Outlook to Google Calendar, then using your Google Calendar to do the SMS bit. Not exchange, but close.
posted by Pants! at 2:32 PM on August 6, 2007

If you're willing to put some cash into it and aren't in love with your current phone, any phone that runs Windows Mobile syncs up very nicely with exchange.

I have a Motorola Q that I purchased for $100. I pay ~$40 a month via the SERO program (Sprint Employee Referral Offer -- see this fatwallet thread) for 600 minutes and unlimited mobile internet (although in theory tethering is not allowed).

The Motorola Q does suffer from a number of issues (crashier than I'd like, bad battery life if you make a lot of calls, dearth of third-party software), but the exchange syncing is excellent. It looks like they offer the "new" q with the SERO plan now, so some of these issues might have been addressed.
posted by fishfucker at 4:36 PM on August 6, 2007

Response by poster: I'm looking for a phone independent way to get reminders.. As server side a possible.
posted by cowmix at 4:53 PM on August 6, 2007

I don't think you'll find anything server-side that won't require changes to Exchange; any Exchange rules you'd set up that would run on the server would *not* do what you're looking for without Exchange being enhanced by some 3rd party plug-in. So almost anything else will have to be a "run from your desktop and send to your cell phone" situation.

If you open up Outlook, go to Help, and search on "Reminder", you'll get hits on commercial plug-ins (look to be around $10 or $30, depending) that will do just this: automatically send you an email reminder for calendar items, in some cases for all items, in some cases for anything you don't hit "snooze/dismiss" for at your exchange desktop. They are likely client side tools, however, so would need to be running on your desktop machine.

You could also (fairly simply, all things considered) whip up a vbscript that runs every couple of minutes on your desktop, reads your outlook via CDO, and sends a mail to your SMS address if there are any calendar items about to alarm.


Ultimately? You'll probably have far, far better luck syncing your phone to Outlook, even if just by a USB cable (as opposed to wirelessly), and letting the phone's internal calendar remind you.
posted by hincandenza at 6:35 PM on August 6, 2007